For Rim’s Edge, Christine Rebhuhn will create sculptural objects that explore the absurdities of word play translated into physical form. Through a sharp observation of visual overlap, her work misaligns mundane and peripheral objects. At a certain moment, she finds an uncanny juncture where things iterate each other formally – as if visual poetry, or a form of deadpan humor. It is a process of uncoupling objects from their reliance on function, and reassigning meaning to unmanageable ends. Rebhuhn works through these ideas sculpturally, allowing the absurd to be the dominant form of communication.

“Laughter, as one of humanity’s most sumptuous extravagances, even to the point of debauchery, stands at the lip of the void, offers us the void as a pledge”– Pierre Piobb, Les Mysteres des dieux (Paris, 1936)

Rebhuhn constructs objects that form illogical pairings yet echo each other visually, asking the viewer to suspend judgment and embrace a new definition. These pairings allow a more intricate narrative to be discovered through language, “normal structure is unbound by a tireless comedic sensibility.” The work becomes both a play on form, and a play on word definitions. Rebhuhn transforms meaning by knitting together the unexpected. These hybrids will include a pair of vacuum formed headphones and a taxidermy bat, two truck mirrors and ear protection, a clarinet box with cheerios and milk, and a twelve-foot photograph of an albino Burmese python inserted into a clear tube, just to name a few.

Christine Rebhuhn currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Rebhuhn received her MFA in ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BA in studio art and psychology at Kalamazoo College. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including Korea Ceramic Foundation in Incheon, Korea, Cranbrook Art Museum and recently at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She has also been selected for numerous residency programs including Elsewhere, NARS Foundation, and The Vermont Studio Center. This will be her first exhibition in Minnesota.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Liza Sylvestre Interference: A multi-media installation

Jul 29 - Aug 27, 2017

Liza Sylvestre explores her personal struggle with what it means to live in a hearing world in this immersive installation.

Interference is an immersive multi-media experience created by artist Liza Sylvestre. Sylvestre explores her personal struggle with what it means to live in a hearing world. She wears a cochlear implant, which enables her to hear to a degree, but she still struggles with how much to conceal or reveal about her inability to follow conversations in certain settings. Sylvestre’s current body of work is an exploration of constantly feeling exposed and vulnerable to judgment. It encrypts information obfuscating the meaning of words both written and spoken to the viewer through drawings and video.

By creating barriers to understanding the work becomes its own specialized language in which Sylvestre can explore mechanisms of how to take back control of language. This inverts her feelings of isolation onto the audience. Some aspects of the exhibition allow for a partial understanding, producing a sense of confusion or misinterpretation such as the pages upon pages of personal handwritten text pinned to the wall with letters redacted. In Background Noise, the viewer will put on headphones while facing a video monitor confronted face to face by Sylvestre talking at a volume that is partially audible, all the while a high pitch buzzing pulsates in the background. While other pieces such as The Invisible Language eliminates any perceptible form of communication, reducing words to a series of sounds without definition. All of the work translates Liza Sylvestre’s auditory experiences and her view of language as “an object that can be divided, pulled apart and put back together in new forms.”

Liza Sylvestre is currently a University Fellow and an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Sylvestre’s work has been shown nationally in many cities including Miami, FL, Berkeley, CA and Portsmouth, NH. She recently completed a 25-piece commission for the 4 star James Hotel on Miami Beach and her artwork is part of the permanent collection of the Rochester Museum of Fine Art in New Hampshire. Sylvestre is the co-founder of Creating Language Through Arts, an educational arts residency that focuses on using art as a means of communication when there are language barriers present due to hearing loss. In 2014, she was awarded both and Artists Initiative and Arts Learning grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Recently she has been the recipient of a VSA Jerome Emerging Artists Grant, and a fellowship through Art(ists) on The Verge.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Organized by Megan Vossler EKPHRASTIC 2.0

Jul 29 - Aug 27, 2017

EKPHRASTIC 2.0 is the second iteration of an experiment in collaborative multi-panel storytelling, facilitated by artist Megan Vossler.

EKPHRASTIC 2.0 is the second iteration of an experiment in collaborative multi-panel storytelling, facilitated by artist Megan Vossler. Over the course of five weeks, thirty-seven and counting participating artists will stop by SooVAC to draw onsite, as the drawings are completed they will be displayed on the walls in an exquisite corpse style narrative.

The final week of the exhibition, writers James Cihlar, William Reichard, and more TBA will visit the completed drawing and create short narrative responses  hence, the title EKPHRASTIC. (Ekphrasis = Greek term for the interpretation, description, or amplification of an existing artwork in one medium, by using another medium. For example, a drawing of a story, or a story about a drawing.)

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Celebrated as one of the most innovative sculptors of our time, Katharina Fritsch (German, b. 1956) mines the history, myths, and fairy tales of Germany as well as her own thoughts and dreams to explore the nature of human perception and experience. By using everyday objects as subject matter—small animals, body parts, religious figurines, and other elements from the made and natural worlds—and altering them through unexpected shifts in scale, color, and materials, Fritsch evokes a sense of wonder and blurs the boundaries between the ordinary and the deeply symbolic.

Katharina Fritsch: Multiples spans the artist’s career, from early examples from her student years at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie to later pieces, providing a look into her long-standing themes and ideas through some 40 works drawn from the Walker’s collection. The show is presented as a companion exhibition to celebrate the installation of Fritsch’s monumental new work in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The 20-foot-high ultramarine blue Hahn/Cock (2013/2017), the artist’s largest public art piece in a US museum collection, will be unveiled in the newly renovated Garden in June 2017.

Katharina Fritsch: Multiples is made possible by generous support from Aedie and John McEvoy, Michael J. Peterman and David A. Wilson, Robert and Rebecca Pohlad, and Elizabeth Redleaf.